The Everlasting: Book of the Spirits. It is the third of four "foundation books" that make up the game world, although each stand alone very well. Each foundation book details a particular segment of the "Secret World" - this particular one concerns itself with the spirit entities that inhabit the setting.
The book opens with the usual game fiction. It's... well, game fiction. It didn't really tell me much about the setting not implicit from the back cover, but not having the other three books, I may be missing out on something.
Still, great games have been published with outright *horrible* fiction in them, so I put that aside and dove into the meat of the book. The first three chapters comprise a basic introduction to the game and setting. There's the requisite "what is role-playing" bit; this is a little more in-depth than most core books as a stated feature of The Everlasting is to cover both live-action play and tabletop, as well as offer a variety of resolution systems in one book. This last part is interesting, as the game is made to work on either a d12 dicepool or on the draw of a pack of cards (playing or tarot). A deck of cards is a little easier to use than dice in LARP play, so while it's not quite as dead simple as playing rock-paper-scissors in a Mind's Eye Theatre game, it allows for a greater range of results. If you prefer dice, being able to dig out those oft-neglected d12s is a bonus.
The section also adds a little more detail as to what the game setting actually is. Much like other popular "modern fantasy" games, it's set in what is basically our world, but with a hidden side. This hidden side is called "The Reverie", and the deeper one is in it, the more attuned to magical and hidden things you become, while at the same time losing touch with reality. If you go deep enough, you wind up in other realms of thought, such as the Dreamworlds, astral realms, and the like. There's also a land hidden on Earth only accessible by going through the Reverie - the Doomlands, which is suspiciously a lot like Mordor and every other "dark land" envisioned in fantasy novels the world over. Finally, there's an alien world - Otgon - that's been at war with Earth for awhile, home to demons and abominations and other evil icky things. All in all, a wide variety of places for player characters to go to and get in trouble, except they aren't player characters in this game. I'll get that later.
Character creation is standard point-based procedure, with an optional semi-random method if you like. Three general types of spiritual beings are yours to choose - gargoyles, manitou, the Possessed. Character attributes are divided into Body, Mind, and Soul, each with three sub-attributes(Aspects), ranging from 1 to 10. Skills are divided into broad categories (Aptitudes) and narrower ones (Skills), which can range from 0 to 5 at chargen, and can be increased up to 12 with experience for supernatural beings like yourself - mortals have to live with a 7 maximum. Finally, you have Distinctions, which are miscellaneous good and bad things you can add to flesh out the character, and the various supernatural powers of your character type.
The game system itself is simplicity - you draw a number of cards/roll dice equal to the appropriate Aspect, compare them to the difficulty of the task (normally 9, but can be modified by situation and skills) and count up the successes. If you have more ones than successes, you have a "disaster" and bad things happen. There is, in addition to the cards and dice, a suggested freeform system for those who would prefer to play without any sort of random number generator, and an expansion of the card system that involves the Major Arcana of a tarot pack.
The second major section of the book gives greater detail on the player character types. Gargoyles were originally bodiless spirits, bound into artificial bodies and charged to do the wishes of a secret cult, long ago. Now, most of the gargoyles are free of their control. but still feel the need to perform their function as watchers and protectors. Their primary tool in this is "Sin-Eating", where they can touch a person and relive an evil experience that person has done, and then deliver penance in the form of some kind of harm on the sinner, matched to the severity of the sin. As sin-eating is the only time a gargoyle can feel sensation, it is possible for a gargoyle to become addicted to the feeling and become the very thing they hunt. Manitou are people possessed by animal totems; they gain abilities related to that animal, and with time come to physically resemble the totem. Their purpose is to preserve nature and to fight against unnatural things; a particular enemy of theirs is the above-mentioned planet of Otgon, home to all sorts of demons and abominations that are trying to invade Earth through various means - some physically, some by taking over mortal hosts in a manner not unlike the manitou. Lastly, the Possessed are spirits from the Dreamworlds. There's evil ones, "yugtuhul", who seek to corrupt good souls, and "benedra", who were once human millennia ago, accidently set the yugtuhul free, and are currently spending existence trying to hunt them down.
The third part of the books gives detail to some of the other beings of the Secret World - the various abominations from Otgon. Related to these abominations are the Great Old Ones. Yes, Cthulhu fans, THOSE Great Old Ones. Most of Lovecraft's stuff is now public domain, after all - although Visionary Entertainment does give a shout-out to Chaosium in a side-bar and quite frankly, the Mythos fits right into the world depicted so far. In addition to these nasties, Djinn are detailed, as beings composed of both spirit and matter. They mostly oppose the Great Old Ones, although there is a faction that seek to free them. The section concludes with an overview of the other "playable" creatures of the Secret World, but gives just enough information to wing them as NPCs, should you choose to have them appear.
The last section of Book of the Spirits gives a little more detail on the parts of the setting not directly relevant to the spiritual types, more detailed rules for magic and miscellaneous situations, and GM advice - basically, odds and ends that don't fit elsewhere in the book.
There's a lot of good things to say about The Everlasting: Book of the Spirits. It offers a playing style not unlike that in White Wolf's World of Darkness books, but without the concerns of "metaplot" and with an eye at allowing all these different supernatural creatures to plausibly inhabit the same world. The Cthulhu Mythos naturally goes swell with anything, although a lot of the inspiration here seems to be from the later, non-Lovecraft stories that went and added hope to the setting... something that I agree with, in principle, but I feel the point of Mythos stories is lost when you are no longer facing against something that you can't really win against and doesn't even have the courtesy to properly hate you... and you go against it anyway. Still, if you don't like the Mythos bits, they're tangental enough to the meat of things to be removed without a lot of problems.
On the down side, the art is a mixed bag. there's a lot of lovely old woodcuts and illuminated illustrations, but they clash somewhat with the original art which has some good pieces but is mostly kind of "eh". The book could have used some much better editing - Steven Brown is listed as the Writer *and* Editor, and I think that The Everlasting shows exactly what happens when you don't have a pair of eyes not your own go over the manuscript finely. The organization is haphazard - the outline I gave above is mostly accurate, but bits and pieces are strewn throughout - and there are a lot of awkward turns of phrase. Chapers seven and eight ("Djinn" and "Abominations" respectively in the table of contents) are reversed, with Djinn being covered in chapter eight. To top it all off, the character sheet is a real triumph of style over substance, with the various main stats arranged in a pretty concentric circle design that's a real pain for actually referencing figures. I highly suggest finding some fan-made sheets or doing it yourself.
Now, as for that "player characters aren't player characters" bit I mentioned earlier, The Everlasting is packed to the gills with renamed terms. You don't have characters, you have "protagonists". You don't have a game master, you have a "Guide". You aren't playing a roleplaying game, you're having a "legendmaking experience", and suggests opening and closing ceremonies to lend further importance to the event. This in itself isn't that bad - I own and enjoy at least a dozen other games that do the same sort of thing. No, what's bad is the author takes pains to figuratively hit you upside the head with how HIS game is all different and better than all those "roll-playing" games you might be used to because his explores character and "personal mythology". Page 16 sidebar, I'm looking at you. This gets especially interesting when the author goes on to talk about how roleplaying can induce an altered state of imagination, and real magick versus "fantasy magic", and so on and so forth.
I can't speak for everyone, but that sort of talk is the quickest possible way to turn me off of a game. If your game is great, it will speak for itself. We KNOW you think it's the best thing since sliced cliche', that's why you wrote it. Going on about personal mythology, horror, and angst and how you shouldn't set out to power-game playing beings of incredible supernatural power... I think that qualifies as "ironic".
While there's a lot of bits I really hate about The Everlasting, there's a lot of good meaty bits there too. Given the copyright date on the material (1994) I presume many of the similarities to the World of Darkness are coincidental, and once you get past the basic outline and dice/cardpool system, it's not really so similar after all. There's at least one character type that is a good shades-of-grey hero sort (the benedra) and another that can be played as such (the gargoyles), which as a unrepentant wannabe good guy, I appreciate. I don't think this game is quite aimed at my Unknown Armies, Mage, and Exalted-loving self, but for those who want to play a mix of Gaiman and Lovecraft, this isn't a bad choice at all.
